Ancient Geeks Reminder
Episode 6 dropped on Monday.
As Kathy kindly noted in today, Episode 6 of Ancient Geeks dropped earlier this week.
This week: classic science fiction writers, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Le Guin, Zelazny, Ellison, Bradbury, Herbert, Dick, and countless others. In novels and short stories, they filled our brains with big ideas, and left us wanting for more!
In future episodes, we’ll talk about many of these authors in greater depth. For now, let’s take a galactic tour of classic science fiction.
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Next week (dropping on Monday): Early Marvel Comics with a focus on the Fantastic Four and the Mighty Thor!
IMO Clarke was best with short stories. In novels, he tended to lose the plot now and then.
I’ve always thought 2001 was overhyped. It’s also among the subgenre I call non-contact stories, which ironically includes Sagan’s “Contact.” Explanation: we do find aliens or become aware of their existence, and nothing changes. Clarke had to wait a few decades to change things in 2010 (and should have stopped there).
I like his 70s and 80s works better. Like The Fountains of Paradise, Imperial Earth, and Songs of Distant Earth.
Rama, now, had a big problem. I think Clarke never knew what Rama was, what it was for, who built it, who launched it, where it was ultimately headed, etc. It’s a very interesting travelogue to an alien world, but nothing more.
That said, I read the sequels, largely written by Gentry Lee, and even got the PC game based on them. It has interesting aliens, but the purpose given to Rama rather disappointed me.
One of his last works, The Light of Other Days, co-written with Stephen Baxter, was rather interesting, in a dreadful, revolting sort of way. it’s also very un-Clarke like.
I read it only a couple of years ago, on audiobook, and I should revisit it soon.
Some more Asimov trivia related to my post earlier today.
In both Caves and The Naked Sun, Asimov imagines a very homogeneous society when it comes to attitudes about open space and human contact. To be fair, one character in the latter bucks the trend (ie they are more normal). But that kind of homogeneity is just not realistic. Aside: I buy it more in the case of Nightfall, where darkness was simply never experienced by the vast majority of the population*.
Anyway, these two novels date from some time in the mid-late 50s, when Asimov turned away from novels to write more science popularizations, in large part due to the nasty surprise called Sputnik. He kept writing short stories, and now and then a novel, but he left his robot and foundation novels alone, until the 1980s.
Initially the third robot novel, The Robots of Dawn, should have struck a balance between too many people, as in Caves, and too many robots, as in Naked Sun. But by then Asimov also got the idea to unite the robot and foundation series. So, among other things, he had to come up with a reason why no robots exist in the foundation universe. His solution was to decide that robots limit human initiative too much and this leads to social and cultural decay**. So, no more robots.
I find this deeply ironic. Asimov was dissatisfied with the stories about robots in his youth. Either robots overthrew humans and killed everyone (long before Terminator, there was Rossum’s Universal Robots), or they were a stand in for a mistreated minority. So young Asimov decided robots are tools, like other machines, and should have built in safeguards. enter the famous 3 laws of robotics.
The decision to unify the two series and explain the absence of robots from one, necessitated making robots a deadly or stultifying influence on humanity. effectively robots were destroying human society, so they had to be abandoned. Essentially that’s the evil robots plot, without conscious evil. it’s also more than a bit anti-technological.
*Neither the short story nor the much latter novelization explain how the people of Lagash/Kalgash slept. Nor how they developed and printed chemical photographic film.
**This is well illustrated in Caliban, the first book of Roger McBride Allen’s new robot trilogy, set on the planet Inferno.
Thank you for giving some love to Alfred Bester. In addition to his two must-read novels, he also wrote some of the most-anthologized short stories of the era:
Fondly Fahrenheit
The Men Who Murdered Mohammed
The Starcomber (aka 5,271,009)
I am apparently 5 or 10 years older than you; the books available during our Formative Years were slightly different. I’m a bit surprised that, while you mentioned Jack Vance in the fantasy show, you didn’t really talk about him as a science fiction writer. The “Demon Princes” series is an all-time classic begun in the 60s, and there was a lot more to follow. The Languages of Pao was the first hard SF to use linguistics as the underlying science. Emphyrio, the Durdane novels, the Alastor novelets, Big Planet, Maske: Thaery, … he probably published more science fiction than fantasy.
I gave up browsing the web on the phone just before going to bed, in favor of re-reading some of my many paper books. The list so far is:
The Caliban trilogy
The Robot novels
The Integral Trees
The Smoke Ring
A World Out of Time
The Fountains of Paradise (currently)
Some other science fiction authors whose work I have greatly enjoyed:
David Brin
Iain M. Banks
James Blish
Orson Scott Card
Lois McMaster Bujold
Joe Haldeman
R.A. Lafferty
Alexei Panshin
Matt Ruff
Eric Frank Russell
James Schmitz
Neal Stephenson
Vernor Vinge
Connie Willis
Gene Wolfe
Also, especially for short stories and novellas:
Greg Egan
Ted Chiang
Terry Bisson
Theodore Sturgeon
William Tenn
James Tiptree, Jr.